In Part 3 of my critical thinking and education series, I am posting a video from Charlotte Iserbyt, the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the tenure of Ronald Reagan, and author of “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”, as the substantive portion of this commentary.  Ms. Iserbyt’s father and grandfather were members of the Skull & Bones secret society and as Senior Policy Advisor of the OERI, Ms. Iserbty had access to an abundance of secretive minutes from past educational policy meetings that revealed the true intention of the Rockefeller and Carnegie funded global education system. Whether or not you believe everything Ms. Iserbyt has to say, her pedigree makes the interview a definite worthwhile listen despite its length and is sure to make you reconsider your views about institutional academics.

We, at SmartKnowledgeU, have long stated that business school curricula promotes and instills zero knowledge critical to understanding how capital markets truly operate and how to create wealth.  For this reason, we have often stated that “Delaying a College Education in this Economy is the Right Choice.” If we were responsible for building a nation’s business educational curricula, here are some of the topics we would consider mandatory, none of which are taught in business schools today, and all of which are part of the SmartKnowledgeU Wealth Secrets educational online course:

A History Of Central Banks and Their Motives
How Money is Created, How the Monetary System Operates, & The True Definition of Money
The Real Definition of Inflation
How to Properly Interpret “Official” Government Key Economic Indicators
How to Interpret Publicly Released Corporate Earnings Statements
How Bankers Have Shaped World Thought Through Academia & Media
Understanding Fractional Reserve Banking
Understanding Austrian v Keynesian Economics
The Real Story Behind the Efficient Market Hypothesis & Diversification Strategies
The Monetary History & Investment Value of Silver
The Monetary History & Investment Value of Gold

You may find Part I & Part II of this SmartKnowledgeU series on Education & Critical Thinking below:

Part I: Lack of Critical Thinking is Key to the Corrupt Status Quo Maintaining Their Power

Part II: The Hidden Dark Agenda of Public Education

About the author: JS Kim is the Founder and Chief Investment Strategist for SmartKnowledgeU, a fiercely independent investment research and consulting firm with a mission of helping to stomp out Wall Street fraud and to reinstitute sound monetary principles and sound money worldwide. We sincerely appreciate all of you that continue to “like” our Facebook fan page and “follow us” on Twitter. Through these mediums, we will keep all of you aware of some major campaigns we will be launching in early 2012 to raise global awareness of monetary truth and our proposed solutions to institute sound money that CAN serve as a viable and implementable solution to the financial ills heaped upon us by the global banking cartel.

Republishing Rights: The above may be reprinted on other sites as long as all text and links remain intact, INCLUDING the “about the author” text. Sites that republish our articles and do not abide by these rules will be asked to remove the article for copyright infringement violation.

With everyone mesmerized in the past week with the issue of whether or not the credit rating agencies would downgrade the US’s rating, I tweeted the following this past July 29th:

“think that a deal to raise debt ceiling will be announced before deadline. but in the end, whether it happens or not is really irrelevant.”

“for debt ceiling to be raised or not is like choosing b/w being on a sinking rubber raft or the sinking Titanic. both outcomes will be same”

“only timeline for crisis will change because no problems will have been solved whether debt ceiling is raised or not. that is the key point.”

Frankly, I really didn’t care whether the US credit rating was downgraded because in my mind, it should’ve been downgraded at least 5 years ago and I knew that any subsequent downgrade, if it happened, would not reflect the true state of the disaster that is the banker/US government kleptocracy. I knew that the fundamentals supporting gold and silver would not be changed by the outcome of this credit rating downgrade and that gold, regardless if the bankers and the CME colluded in the future to knock down prices by raising margins and forcing longs to liquidate, as they did with silver recently, would still recover strongly in the future no matter how far they were able to take prices down in their bogus-run futures markets in London and New York.

Commercial investment advisers consistently dole out some of the worst financial advice I have ever encountered. Why? I believe sometimes advisers at huge firms want to do what’s best for their clients but this often conflicts with their corporate directive, which is to feed the corporation’s bottom line. So even now, though there is a very high probability in my opinion, that the GLD and SLV ETF are fraudulent funds, commercial investment advisers continue to shuttle their clients that want exposure to gold and silver into these vehicles (read here for more on this).

Secondly, financial advisers can almost never contradict the top investment strategists of their company. For example, Robin Bew, chief economist at HSBC Bank, predicts gold will fall to $1390 by year-end and to $1000 by 2013. If the Chief Economist at your firm is predicting a substantial drop in gold prices, then as an adviser at this firm, you can’t very well advise your clients to buy mining stocks on the falling gold prediction of your Chief Economist, even if you believe they will go on a monumental run in the second half of this year.

One thing I truly believe, however, as you can see in the below graph (note: the below graph is from the end of last week), is that this current correction in gold and silver mining stocks have made them supremely cheap again and that the best-in-class mining stocks, when this correction ends, will offer some of the best returns of any asset class for the remainder of 2011 given the obvious and deliberate devaluation Central Bankers are inflicting upon the US dollar and the Euro.

Again, one has to remember that concentration does not equal risk though the commercial investment industry really wants all their clients to believe this rubbish concept. Secondly, corrections in gold and silver, though they are very frequently sold by the commercial investment industry as the “bursting of the precious metals bubble”, are just that – corrections, and additionally buying opportunities to accumulate more physical, when they happen. If one truly understands the fraudulent nature of today’s fractional reserve banking system, one would realize that concentrated strategies are the ONLY strategies that have led to wealth preservation, wealth growth and risk reduction in the past few years. Not owning a single ounce of physical gold and physical silver in this environment is absolute insanity (and remember if you own the GLD and the SLV, you DO NOT own a single ounce of physical gold or physical silver). Recall last week’s conversation below to know that politicians and bankers will lie to you much more frequently than they will ever tell you the truth.

Fox Business Reporter Peter Barnes: “Is there a risk that the United States could lose its AAA credit rating? Yes or no?”
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner: “No risk of that.”
Barnes: “No risk?”
Geithner: “No risk.”

After all, former US Federal Vice Chairman and current Princeton University economics professor Alan Blinder, in perhaps what was one of the most misanthropic statements of all time, condescendingly stated, “The LAST DUTY of a Central Banker is to tell the public the truth.” (emphasis mine). At SmartKnowledgeU, we have seen this disaster coming since 2006 and have literally been urging our clients for six years now to buy physical gold and physical silver. For those that have concentrated their investments in gold and silver the last 6 years, the rewards have been tremendous, even through the disaster of 2008. Still, it certainly is not too late to benefit from gold and silver investments right now though the Commercial Investment and Banking industry may be trying to convince you otherwise.

At SmartKnowledgeU, we believe that this current correction in mining stocks will offer the last great buying opportunity of the year and that any future correction in gold and silver that may happen before the end of the summer (if it even happens) will also offer the last buying opportunity of the year. And whether QE3 happens or not, this is irrelevant to investing in gold and silver assets. It is our firm belief, QE3 or not, that gold and silver will provide far superior returns to any global stock market for the remainder of this year and in future years as well.

About the author: JS Kim is the Chief Investment Strategist of SmartKnowledgeU, a fiercely independent investment research and consulting firm that tirelessly works to counter the propaganda of the commercial investment industry to provide the best and most profitable investment strategies to our clients year after year. Follow us on Twitter.
Republishing rights: The above article may be republished as long as all text and links remain intact in their entirety, including the above author acknowledgment.

During sharp corrections and/or consolidation periods in gold and silver, I inevitably stumble upon comments posted by gold/silver investors online that become greatly worried by some article posted by some analyst online that states that the silver and gold bull run has ended and that silver and gold prices are now going to crash. When this happens, gold/silver investors need to keep their focus on the big picture to avoid being led astray by the white noise that will constantly surround them during every single gold and silver pull back. As for the subset of gold and silver investors who, by nature, are worrisome creatures, they will always find analysts in the mainstream media that will gladly fuel their anxiety during every gold and silver correction or consolidation period. For ten years in a row now, gold and silver analysts come out of the woodwork to state that gold and silver are going to crash every single time these particular assets suffer a decent, rapid short-term correction or consolidation period.

To begin, it is quite easy to dismiss many of the analysts that call for a crash in gold and silver simply by conducting an internet search of their past predictions. Doing so will reveal that some of theses analysts have called for a crash of gold and silver every single year since the gold and silver bull run began. Other searches will reveal that many of these analysts are just flat-out terrible and that they have made many other severe warnings about commodity crashes just about at the exact time they bottomed and then proceeded to soar higher. Why waste energy worrying about an analyst’s calls when that analyst has proven himself or herself to be massively wrong multiple times year in and year out?

But what about analysts whose calls have been fairly accurate in the past and whose current calls create a level of concern for you? Then use this second process of separating the wheat from the chaff. Search the internet, find this analyst’s blog, and read about this analyst’s calls in the same asset class over a multiple numbers of years. If you can’t find any public record of past calls for this analyst regarding the specific asset class he or she is speaking of, then dismiss this analyst. Sure, a lot of analysts will want to reserve their most detailed and best analysis for their paying clients only and perhaps this is why they lack any kind of past track record. I reserve my best and most detailed calls and strategies for my paying clients only as this makes good business sense. If an analyst posted his best calls online all the time, why would anyone every pay the analyst for information they can receive for free?

However, if any analyst ever wants to develop his or her business, he or she needs to establish a track record in the public arena as well to prove he or she indeed is worthy of a following. After establishing a track record for at least two or three years, then such an analyst can begin to pull back his public predictions and reserve them more exclusively for the privacy of his or her clients only. Thus, I believe that any analyst worth his or her salt will have a decent public track record.

Given the rise of gold/silver in the public consciousness for the past several years, there are now a plethora of self-proclaimed gold and silver analysts online now that have no discernible track record of accurate past predictions regarding past movements in the gold and silver markets nor had made a single comment about gold or silver markets until two or three years ago. First of all, if such a person was truly an expert in gold and silver, realizing that we are in the midst of one of the largest gold and silver bulls of our lifetime only after gold had risen from $250 an ounce to $1000 an ounce and silver from $4 to $16 an ounce should automatically disqualify that person from ever being able to proclaim they are an “expert”. Furthermore, if an analyst has discussed gold and silver markets before but never once discussed fraud and manipulation in gold and silver futures markets until the past couple of years when it became “chic” and mainstream to do so, then his or her credibility should be highly questionable. The job of an analyst is to dig deeper than the level of public understanding and to not be afraid of taking a stance that he or she knows to be true even if the rest of the world disagrees with him or her at the time. How could a gold/silver analyst refuse to acknowledge the single most important factor – fraud and manipulation – that frequently moves these markets in the short-term, for years and call him or herself a gold/silver analyst? The equivalent scenario would be a US stock market analyst that refuses to acknowledge the massive effect of US Federal Reserve POMO schemes on the current short-term market behavior of the S&P 500, the DJIA and NASDAQ.

On January 25th, in this article I posted an article titled “Will Junior Mining Stocks be THE Investment of 2011?” on my online investment blog, the Underground Investor.

I iterated that my outlook for gold’s ongoing correction would be for a short-term bottom to form “somewhere around the $1,300 an ounce mark…and not with a further $250 an ounce correction and the $1,090 an ounce mark called for by Seabreeze Partners Management’s GP Doug Kass.” I further stated, “I’m going to directly contradict Kass and predict a pop higher of at least $40 to $50 an ounce in gold sometime during the 10 trading days between January 28th and February 11th.”

To my subscribing Platinum Members, to whom I provide much more detailed analysis than anything I publish in the public arena, I granted them even tighter timeframes for the turnaround on January 25th –

“I believe that this correction will end by Friday of this week [January 28th] if not sooner and that we are very close to a strong reversal now. Look for a bottom to form, and a rebound from gold at about $1,300 and the HUI at about 495.”.

In regard to these predictions, I provided subsequent actionable strategies regarding gold/silver mining stocks as well. For the time being, gold bottomed at about $1,308 an ounce on January 28th in Asia, and the HUI bottomed in New York at 492.04 later on the same day (I issued my bulletin to my members before market open in New York that day). Between January 28th in Asia and February 4th in New York, gold popped higher by $51.70 an ounce, meeting my call for a $40 to $50 bounce between January 28th and February 11th.

I based these short-term predictions and dates of short-term reversals not by blindly picking numbers out of a hat, but by studying the behavior of the bullion bank manipulators that continuously manipulate gold (and silver) markets and by combining this information with technical chart analysis. Of course, we’re not completely out of the woods yet with gold and silver, and I’ll have to track and interpret both technical charts and the movements of bullion bank manipulators on a daily basis to understand whether this reversal in gold/silver markets will now stand its ground or not. Below, I’ll provide further examples of how I’ve been incorporating fraud and manipulation analysis into my technical analysis to accurately foresee both the short-term and long-term direction of gold and silver markets for years.

With gold and silver futures markets, one must understand the mechanisms of the likely fraudulent paper gold and silver ETFs, the GLD and SLV, and the fraudulent paper gold and silver futures markets and how both of these paper markets influence gold/silver prices independent of free market supply and demand mechanisms. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the difference between the mechanisms of how markets truly operate and the false mechanisms that business schools worldwide teach to the future analysts of the world. An analyst must always keep in mind fraud and manipulation whenever using technical charts to predict future behavior in manipulated markets or that analyst’s technical analysis will ALWAYS be distorted and inaccurate. Whether it’s by design, sheer arrogance or plain ignorance, this is why a five-year-old child’s predictions about future US market behavior during the last five years would have stacked up very well against the predictions made by supposedly very learned men like US Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

On September 16, 2006, in my article “Has the Commodities Bubble Burst? No, No, No!”, I stated:

“Everywhere in the media, you have pundits saying that the commodities Bull Run is over – including even chief global economists of major investment firms like Steven Roach of Morgan Stanley. THEY’RE ALL WRONG…I’ve dug deep enough down into the rabbit hole to know that gold will rise much much higher in the future.. Yes, oil has slipped to below $60 a barrel but again, this doesn’t mean that oil is done either.”

At the time I made the above prediction, gold had tumbled nearly 14% in the previous two months to $573 an ounce, oil had tumbled 25% from $80 a barrel to $60 a barrel and many global commodity analysts had called for people to sell out of all commodity based stocks across the board. In particular, a few precious metals analysts used this steep correction to foment fear among gold investors and called for gold to retrace all the way back down to its initial starting point in this gold bull run at $250 an ounce. So what happened? Gold, by the end of 2007, soared from its September 2006 correction that was supposed to usher in a collapse, by more than 45%, to $833 an ounce!

And for those of you that believe I am always positive on gold and silver because many of my public postings happen to be posted near interim bottoms when gold and silver are set to rebound, this is hardly the case. In my last 2010 Crisis Investment Opportunities newsletter issue, I warned of an impending gold/silver correction to begin 2011:

“The likely time frame for the likelihood of a Central Bank engineered attack against gold and silver prices has now been pushed out until January or February 2011.”

Interpretation of fraud and manipulation can help one identify warnings about short-term pullbacks in the price of certain assets as well as identify short-term bottoms.

On December 6, 2007, subscribers to my free online investment newsletter received this warning:

“Over the past six months, soaring oil prices are much more directly connected to a devaluing dollar than decreasing oil supply or peak oil. Had the Gulf Nations declared this week that they were going to unpeg their currencies from the U.S. dollar, I guarantee you that oil would have shot up beyond $100 to $120 a barrel within a matter of weeks [oil was trading at $88 a barrel at this time]. And that would have had nothing to do with supply and demand and everything to do with feared U.S. dollar weakness.”

Again, my statement above had nothing to do with fundamentals or technical charts but everything to do with the fraudulent nature of the US dollar and my understanding of the fraudulent nature of currency and oil markets. Sure enough, several Gulf Nations unofficially and quietly temporarily unpegged their currencies from the US dollar over the next few months, following Saudi Arabia’s lead of temporarily unpegging the Riyal from the US dollar at the end of 2007. During the next six months that followed my above statement, oil rose from just $88.40 a barrel to more than $120 a barrel. In mid-2008, oil peaked out at more than $140 a barrel, though a certain Wall Street firm’s opportunistic positioning in the oil futures markets based upon their knowledge of a single U.S. hedge fund that was short 260 million barrels of oil was largely responsible for the final spike in prices (again, just another example of how short-term price behavior was driven by manipulation of the banks and not supply-demand based).

Today, I’ve read in newspapers from the Americas to Europe to Asia, the attempt of many country’s finance ministers once again to deflect blame away from their Central Banks’ fiat currency devaluation policies as the root cause of rising commodity and oil prices. Today finance ministers worldwide have colluded to keep the people in the dark about reality by stating unilaterally that rising commodity prices are responsible for inflation versus stating the reality that currency manipulation is the main culprit of massive inflation.

This same type of “fraud and manipulation” analysis can be extended to another massively manipulated market, the US stock market. When predicting the future behavior of US stock markets, an analyst must always incorporate the fraud of Federal Reserve POMO schemes and the artificial propping up of a handful of core index stocks that keep entire indexes afloat into one’s technical analysis.

On March 21, 2007, on my investment blog, I pricked quite a few investors’ nerves when I wrote the article “The Short-Term May be Rosy, But Beware the Financial Crisis that is Building Steam”. In fact, back then, the rise of US stock markets on the back of massive fraud and manipulation was remarkably comparable to today’s current state of US stock markets four years later. In that article, I stated:

“Everywhere global stock markets have rebounded whether in China, Australia, Europe, or the US , short positions have decreased dramatically, and the bulls are back in full force. However, there are still two scenarios that every investor should be wary of, one that is very likely, and one that is near inevitable…I know that a lot of people will think that any talk of a future global economic crisis is ludicrous but that is why so few people actually build wealth through investing. Only the handful of people that take the time to really understand the economics that brew well below the surface of the Bloomberg reports and CNBC and the Wall Street Journal will readily prepare their investment portfolios for this crisis.”

“And this crisis that seems inevitable to me will be much bigger than the U.S. Great Depression of the 1930’s and much larger than the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 because the conditions that are creating this crisis will have a much wider and more significant global impact than either of these two previous crises. Before those two crises hit, the overwhelming majority of investors believed that those people that believed a crisis was imminent were crazy. And during those times, salesmen and women in the financial industry were able to leverage the naivete of the thundering sheep herd to get them to do things that led to certain financial ruin.”

The “economics that brew well below the surface of the Bloomberg reports and CNBC and the Wall Street Journal” that I referenced in my above prediction was, of course, the real levels of key economic indicators versus the fraudulent, “official” government-reported economic statists that governments disseminate to the public via mainstream media distribution channels. Because I have always focused my analysis on government and banker levied fraud and manipulation of capital markets, even in March of 2007, at a time when many commercial investment advisors were taking advantage of the steady 9-month advance in US stock markets to tout their usual “get on board [the US market bull] or get left behind” propaganda, the precarious nature of the situation at that time was crystal clear to me.

So what happened after I made this prediction? US markets continued to be rosy in the short-term as the title of my article indicated before eventually topping out in October of that year and falling by more than 20% by March of the next year. As far as the remainder of 2008, we all know the disastrous year that 2008 ended up being worldwide. How did we do in 2008? Our Crisis Investment Opportunities investment newsletter portfolio still ended up positive for the year (barely positive, but still positive). Due to my prediction that a crisis would unfold, we avoided the 40% haircuts that almost all commercial investment firm clients suffered that year. Furthermore, just a few weeks ago, Reuters reported that “home prices fell for the 53rd consecutive month in November, taking the decline past that of the Great Depression for the first time in the prolonged housing slump” and that “home values have fallen 26 percent since their peak in June 2006, worse than the 25.9-percent decline seen during the Depression years between 1928 and 1933”. But what about my prediction that this unfolding crisis would be “much bigger than the US Great Depression”? I still believe that the prediction I made on March 21 of 2007 will come to fruition over the course of the next several years and this global crisis will become much bigger than the US Great Depression as at some point this year, we will move from the eye of the economic hurricane back into the turmoil of the hurricane. In fact, we may already be witnessing the first signs of my prediction above that this current crisis would “have a much wider and more significant global impact than either [the Great Depression or the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis]” in the food and unemployment riots that have already started this year in Egypt, Tunisia, Algieria and India.

By April 23, 2008 as the signs of an imminent US stock market crash were becoming clearer, I posted another warning shot on my investment blog titled “Will US Markets Crash Now or Later?”

In that article, I stated: “Should an extended rally of the Dow above 13,000 occur, it will serve no purpose other than to create the illusion of wealth, as opposed to the creation of real tangible wealth. The higher U.S. markets rise in today’s environment, the more likely it is that they will fall even harder in the future. Here’s why. Currently, the U.S. Federal Reserve is playing the same shell game that it has for decades, one in which they alternately inflate stock markets and real estate markets. If stock markets are crashing, then they inflate real estate markets, and vice versa. It’s a vicious circle that eventually will collapse under the weight of its own foolishness. In the late 1920s, in very simple terms, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s solution to forestall a mild U.S. economic contraction and to stop England’s gold losses was to print more money.”

What happened? The U.S. Market started a steep decline just one month later, shedding almost 5,000 points between May and October of 2008!

In conclusion, I’m not stating that by studying fraud and manipulation, one’s predictions will be spot on year in and year out. There is no analyst, including myself, that has not made, or will not make a prediction or two at some point, that will appear silly in hindsight. No one is infallible, though some may infer as much. But I can guarantee you this. If an analyst incorporates an understanding of how bullion banks and governments operate fraud and manipulation schemes into his or her technical analysis of capital markets, his or her chances of making uncannily accurate calls in the behavior of capital markets year in and year out become exponentially better than if he or she were to attempt to predict future market behavior based on technical analysis alone.

At a time when everyone but the most naïve of the naïve understand how grossly distorted capital prices are both to the upside (in global stock markets) and to the downside (in gold and silver markets) due to massive manipulation schemes executed through collusive bullion-bank and government efforts, it makes zero sense to continue to put faith in technical analysis alone. Though fundamentals may drive behavior in the long-term, fundamentals have had, at times, zero effect on the price discovery of assets in the short-term. Furthermore, with certain sectors such as the banking sector where insolvent bankrupt banks have been magically transformed into solvent profitable banks by corrupt regulatory agencies that have allowed banks to cook their books, the fundamentals of many sectors are not fundamentally sound! Fraud and manipulation analysis today is more than ever, more critical than either fundamental or technical analysis.

About the Author: JS Kim is the Founder and Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, a fiercely independent investment research, education, and consulting firm with a mission of protecting the interests of Main Street from the fraud of Wall Street.

Republishing rights: The above article may be reprinted on other sites as long as all links and text, including the author acknowledgment, remain unchanged.

To contend that someone that attends Oxford, Yale, Harvard, Princeton or the University of Pennsylvania is more intelligent than someone that did not attend these universities encapsulates society’s mistake in how it perceives “intelligence”. Today society mistakenly equates academic knowledge with intelligence. Even at an early age, children are conditioned to mistake academic excellence with intelligence. Teachers praise students that quickly spit back the right answers while ignoring the brilliant student that rejects the rigidity of traditional academia and that quietly may be a genius. In addition, when young children seem disconnected from the academic process and act up, instead of considering boredom or other possibilities as the root cause, in the US and in particular, in Western societies, we leap to conclude they must have Attention Deficit Disorder and that the solution is to medicate them with Ritalin. According to the UK Independent, in 2008, it was estimated that 10% of all children in the US had been prescribed Ritalin. I have also read statistics that in some US cities, 20% to 33% of children in some grades are prescribed Ritalin. That’s an astounding percentage if they are accurate estimates.

During my 13 years of primary, middle, and high school years, I can recall only one child that was on medication for hyperactivity. One. Either something is wrong with education today or something was wrong with medicine back then. I tend to believe the former, not the latter, is true. When I was young, I was the focus of a lot of praise from adults because of my high level of academic aptitude. By the time I was 15-years-old, I had already finished the most advanced Calculus program my school had to offer. A couple of years later, I achieved a perfect score on the math portion of the college-entrance examination test, the SAT. As a result, I was the recipient many times of the societal mistake of equating academic knowledge with intelligence. Consequently, I was repeatedly praised for being “smart”. But how smart could I have really been if none of the knowledge in my brain gave me any understanding about the true history of the world, insight into other cultures, or insight into the mechanisms to accumulate wealth? I believe that most people would include in their definition of a better quality of life, the aspect of wealth accumulation and the possession of financial freedom. School provided me with zero of the knowledge to achieve this. At this point in my life, I had a lot of false academic intelligence but none of the “important intelligence” that really mattered.

Yes, back then, I believed, as does every other person that is unduly praised for academic intelligence, that these accomplishments meant I was uniquely more qualified for employment than nearly everyone else and that I was smarter than most others. I couldn’t have been more wrong! When I attended an Ivy League university, I discovered that nearly everyone one of my fellow students believed that they were smarter than everyone else. Only after I earned my two Master degrees and gained much more experience in the real world did I learn that all the complicated theories I learned in business school had practically zero utility in the process of building wealth. When I started the process of self-education about 15 years ago, I finally began to learn not only how much I didn’t know, but also how much I had learned in school that was downright erroneous, especially in regard to the concepts of money and economics. The truly scary part of this equation is that if I had chosen to rest on my academic laurels instead of probing for the truth on my own, I would still be among the sleeping subset of the population today that holds advanced business degrees and possesses none of what I call “important intelligence”.

There’s a sense of arrogance that society instills in people that have achieved advanced degrees at elite universities that then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me “Where did you go to school?” and then heard the reply, “Oh, you must be smart!” when I answered that I attended an Ivy League university, I’d have a big fat stash of cash from this singular question. Society constantly reinforces the false beliefs of higher intelligence upon those that attend elite institutions of education, and in turn, people with advanced degrees start believing in this empire of illusory intelligence. Consequently, when global economic leaders like Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke truly believe that they know more than anyone else because of all the undeserved praise society has heaped upon them during their academic careers, society suffers tremendously from the propaganda they disseminate. In fact, how often have any of you heard the all-too-quick-to-judge response, “Oh, so you think you’re smarter than a Nobel Prize winning economist?” when you’ve told a friend of yours that Krugman’s theories and analysis are all wrong? My guess is quite a few. This fundamental flaw in how society perceives intelligence is exactly why millions of parents in America continue to send their children to be indoctrinated in the business concepts taught in the academic halls of America, just like cattle that stand on a conveyer belt as they wait for their imminent slaughter.

Wrong Knowledge V. Right Knowledge (aka Smart Knowledge V. Dumb Knowledge)

A high-school dropout can certainly be more intelligent than someone that has earned an MBA from a prestigious university. This is a fact although anyone that has attained an MBA from a prestigious university would likely vehemently oppose this view. I’m sure that after I attained my double Masters, that somewhere in America, there was a teenager beginning the process of self-education that had accumulated a small amount of “smart knowledge” that was much more valuable than the voluminous “dumb knowledge” that was rattling around in my brain. Were I to try to explain the concepts that have given me the vision to make the very accurate series of economic predictions that I discussed in Part 2 of this series, I am very confident that, on average, a high school teenager would begin to grasp and fully understand these concepts much more quickly than a Harvard PhD in economics. Is this because a teenager is more likely to be more intelligent than a Harvard PhD? In my view, with regard to economic reality, yes. Society would say that the Harvard PhD is much more intelligent than the teenager because of his advanced degree and much greater accumulation of knowledge. However, I would argue that the teenager’s ignorance of the “dumb” or “wrong” knowledge that graduate business programs confers upon students grants him a much greater advantage in being able to grasp the concepts I use to make my financial and economic predictions. The teenager’s mind, in a lot of ways, would be much more free than the Harvard PhD’s because it has not been hard-wired with false concepts and made rigid with arrogance. So the teenager possesses two advantages in the intelligence battle. One, the absence of “dumb knowledge”. And two, the ability to learn new concepts foreign to him or her at a quicker pace due to the absence of “dumb knowledge”.

As I stated in Part 1 of this series, the information the institutional academic system teaches you is not the reality of how this world operates, whether the information being transmitted to the student is history, business, or the banking system. Just as the Rothschild banking cabal has stripped their name from many of the large global organizations they control in order to hide their ownership network across varied economic sectors from the public, the men that founded the modern academic system have hidden the real secrets to building wealth from all university curricula. If you were one of the elite families that controlled the business curricula at many of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions (via donations of huge sums of money to these schools), would you not ensure that the secrets to your accumulation of wealth were never taught? Just as monetary stability is not a goal of Central Banks, teaching concepts to help young adults achieve wealth is not a goal of MBA programs. If it were, then every MBA program would offer at least a dozen courses that help students understand the fraud that is pervasive in capital markets. Instead, students across the world are taught concepts about free markets and supply-demand dynamics that do not exist in the real world. The difference between the concepts business schools teach and the reality of capital markets is as marked as the difference between the mark-to-market accounting values and the mark-to-fantasy accounting values of many global banks’ real estate portfolios today.

Thus, it is not the QUANTITY of knowledge nor the amount of money we pay for this knowledge, but the QUALITY and UTILITY of knowledge that grants someone true intelligence. A person that holds 1/100th the business knowledge of his colleague can truly be more intelligent than his colleague if he holds a greater quantity of “right knowledge” than his colleague. For example, someone that studies the financial literacy concepts of compound interest, budgeting, and retirement contributions accumulates a great deal of the wrong type of knowledge. On the other hand, someone that studies Austrian economics, the deceit of government statistics, the mechanisms of Central Banks, and the money trails among Central Banks, corporations, and governments accumulates the right type of knowledge. If one believes an official government statistic of 5% inflation is honest when real inflation in one’s country amounts to 13%, then one may make the mistake of following financial literacy knowledge and doubling one’s IRA contributions if he believes he can attain 8% returns every year. Thus someone that studies financial literacy concepts and makes this choice will end up believing he is doubling his wealth if he achieves 8% returns every year when in reality he will be accelerating his wealth destruction.

As I stated in Part 2 of this series, attaining an MBA definitely filled my head with much more information. But none of this information ever taught me how to make money. If there were a correlation between prestigious MBA programs and the secrets to wealth, then every Harvard, Princeton and Wharton MBA should be a multi-millionaire within several years of graduation.

Your Education Process is Incomplete if You Have Never Educated Yourself Outside of the Traditional Academic System

Earlier, I stated that I believe that intelligence is definitely identified by the capacity to learn more quickly than others. However if one pursues the wrong type of knowledge, then this ability becomes self-defeating as the accumulation of more and more knowledge only makes this person become more and more stupid. So how does one accumulate the right type of knowledge? When it comes to business knowledge, it is impossible to gather this knowledge within the realm of institutional academics so one must engage in the process of self-education. When I first started the process of self-education after completing my double Masters, it took me a full year before I finally was able to completely shed my belief patterns of the many lies I had learned in business school. When I realized that I had been duped by the institutional academic system and that the academic system had taken so much of my hard earned money and only provided me with wrong knowledge in return, it was very difficult to accept this rude awakening. “How could I have been so dumb to waste my hard-earned money on this useless information?” I thought.

As Morpheus states in the Matrix, “We never free a mind once it’s reached a certain age. It’s dangerous.” Likewise, once a person has been conditioned through advanced business courses, it’s extremely difficult to teach such a person the reality of how the business matrix really operates. In this sense, the higher education system provides the perfect system to perpetuate lies, specifically with regard to monetary and business constructs. We, as humans, have a need to validate the price we pay for items with the value we gain from it. Thus the more we pay for education, the more valuable we believe it to be, and the more rigid our belief system will likely become. This is precisely why many alumni will defend the business constructs they have been taught in school with the same level of vigor as if they were defending the honor of their children. I can recall arguing with a colleague of mine about the Reserve Ratio Requirement of banks in the fractional reserve US banking system. He adamantly and repeatedly insisted that it was 10% until I finally extended my hand and said, “I will bet you $10,000 right now that the majority of the largest banks in America keep nowhere close to 10% of deposits as reserves, and I can prove it.” His reply? He finally surrendered his position and stated, “Well, that’s what we learned in business school.”

You Don’t Need Higher Education For Access or For Success in Life

If the attainment of advanced academic degrees does not necessarily produce higher levels of intelligence or even grant one the skill set needed to thrive and succeed in life, are advanced degrees really necessary? When considering specialized degrees such as those in law, medicine, engineering, architecture et al, advanced academic degrees will serve one well. However, the attainment of a specialized advanced degree still does not make one automatically more intelligent than one that has not attained this degree. Furthermore, when considering an MBA, this advanced degree is absolutely not necessary to succeed in life. In considering an MBA, many young adults will conclude that they need to pursue this advanced degree for the access it will provide them. They believe that networking with the sons and daughters of powerful politicians and businessmen is reason enough to spend lots of money to attend a prestigious graduate program. Furthermore, they believe that corporations will not hire them unless they have an advanced degree. All of these beliefs are misguided.

Attending a prestigious university certainly does provide access. That is unquestionable. When I first graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and desired a job in health care, I wrote a fellow alumnus that was on the board of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. Upon receiving my letter, the board member contacted me and suggested that I contact the CEO of a health care corporation that was a personal friend of his. Just like that, I was hired and had a new job. However, the more important question to entertain is whether I could have received the same access had I not attended the University of Pennsylvania? The answer is yes.

One can join business or trade organizations that immediately provide access to multi-millionaires and/or movers and shakers in the industry. Many of these organizations may have hefty dues that can run in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 for admission. Even so, these dues are still a tiny fraction of the cost of attending a prestigious 4-year university. Consider that a four-year undergraduate Harvard University education (tuition, room & board, fees) presently costs upward of $200,000. Because I have joined some of these organizations with expensive dues in the past, I can assure you that the access provided by these organizations is on par with the level of access provided by attending many prestigious universities. Furthermore, many times the access provided by professional clubs and networks may even be more specific and more suited towards one’s needs than the access provided by a prestigious university.

Education is Big Business – Don’t Confuse Needing a Diploma to Succeed in the Corporate World With Needing a Diploma to Succeed in Life

But what about the belief that you need an advanced degree to get ahead in life? This too is a false belief that is a by-product of the educational system. Education is big business and it is the job of university deans all over the world to scare young adults into believing that they will be jobless and homeless without securing that precious piece of paper called a diploma. While it is true that a young adult may need an advanced degree to get ahead in the CORPORATE WORLD, a young adult definitely does not need an advanced degree to get ahead in LIFE.

Many of us whom were educated in the Western world will never consider the pathway of entrepreneurship because of the conditioning we receive throughout our academic careers to pursue a corporate life. This is a huge mistake. Western universities may offer a class in entrepreneurship, but most certainly do not promote the entrepreneurial pathway with the same vigor that they promote the corporate pathway. Furthermore, most universities do not match the monetary and resource contributions dedicated to the promotion of the corporate pathway in their promotion of the entrepreneurial pathway. Think of the enormous resources that every Western university deploys towards pushing their graduates into the corporate world – the act of bringing corporate recruiters to campus, the provision of free sessions with interviewing counselors to sharpen interviewing techniques and skills, the provision of internships to steer students toward that perfect corporate job after graduation, etc. Now think of the resources, or lack thereof, that universities dedicate towards the promotion of entrepreneurialism.

Entrepreneurialism Will Lead to Less Debt, Better Job Security, and a Better Chance of Survival During the Next Decade of this Global Monetary Crisis

As an entrepreneur, it is my sincere belief that the much safer route for young adults to seek during the next decade will be realized through the entrepreneurial pathway versus the traditional pathway of “climbing the corporate ladder”. Why? To begin, the second phase of this monetary crisis is likely to be so severe that the risk of taking a corporate job during this time will likely equal or exceed the risk of becoming an entrepreneur. Therefore pursuing higher academics in business will only burden a young adult with the hardships of debt while providing no more job security than an entrepreneur possesses.

Imagine that you are a 21 year-old young man that has just graduated from Harvard undergrad with a US $150,000 debt to repay and a bleak job environment in which you have to compete with older, more experienced employees with more advanced degrees for a decreasing number of jobs. Now imagine that you are a bright 18 year-old young woman that skips a college business education, interns at a prestigious company for a year, joins industry trade organizations and spends the next two years building contacts while learning the ins-and-outs of the business game, and then starts her own company with no debt at age 21 in a world where holding an advanced degree provides no competitive value over someone that does not. Both are 21 but with uniquely different prospects in life at this point. Who would you rather be? The 21 year-old young man with a massive debt burden, bleak job prospects, and a prestigious degree, or the 21 year-old-young woman with no diploma, almost no debt, and complete control over her success or failure in the future? If a young adult in Western society chooses the corporate pathway and then changes his or her mind after graduating school, due to the enormous expense of attending Western universities, it is quite possible that the selection of corporate pathway may remove a young adult’s option, after graduation, of choosing an entrepreneurial pathway.

The most successful entrepreneurs I’ve encountered during my lifetime are those that hold a very high level of passion for their business. I don’t believe that it will be easy for entrepreneurs in this type of economic environment but I do believe in the ability of passion to trump economic difficulty. Rarely have I ever encountered anyone that works in the corporate world that is passionate about his or her job. I have encountered plenty of entrepreneurs that are passionate about their business, and I do believe that a passionate entrepreneur will eventually become a successful entrepreneur. With passion often comes sincerity, and with sincerity often comes a high degree of customer loyalty. An entrepreneur’s most loyal customers often serve as a second unpaid marketing team for the entrepreneur, extolling the virtues of the entrepreneur’s business to friends and family. During the extended period of economic uncertainty that will prevail during the next decade, this type of customer loyalty is as good as gold and can provide an entrepreneur with solid job security and control over one’s destiny. Remember in the corporate world, career advancement is often based upon a formula that consists of 10% ability and 90% politics, not a favorable equation if one’s politicking skills are not up to par with colleagues that may possess better politicking skills but less true ability.

The Backbone of Creativity, Innovation, and Greatness is the Entrepreneur

Besides better job security and better financial stability, are there other reasons to forgo the traditional route of pursuing advanced academic degrees and climbing the corporate ladder? Again, the answer is a resounding yes. At one point and time, the backbone of American creativity, innovation, and greatness was the entrepreneur. Today, this greatness has been replaced with the inflexibility and rigidity of cookie-cutter advanced degree thinkers that all think alike and that are responsible for the stagnation of the great American business. If one desires America or any other country to return to greatness, then that country is going to have to discourage the traditional route of advanced business degrees that mire young adults in the quicksand of debt and encourage more young adults to become entrepreneurs. However, for the most part, this encouragement will never come from the universities themselves, so young adults must come to this realization on their own. Small business and entrepreneurialism will return America or any other country to greatness again, not huge multinational corporations that choose greed over morality and that view employees as expendable, identical, replaceable cogs in a machine.

The Greater Social Benefits of Entrepreneurialism

Entering the world of entrepreneurialism was simply the best decision of my life. Not only do I have better job security now than ever before but I also have more flexibility in my life than ever before. Perhaps the most important reason why many should turn their back on the traditional corporate route and turn towards entrepreneurialism is the much greater social benefit that I believe entrepreneurs provide to society. If you haven’t yet watched the documentary “The Corporation”, I highly recommend doing so. In this documentary, the filmmakers argue that large corporations fit the profile of a psychopath, exhibiting highly anti-social behavior in the pursuit of their singular goal to maximize the profit of corporate executives and shareholders.

Years ago, when I languished within the confines of a Wall Street firm, I was never able to use my strengths to shine within the corporation because I simply was unwilling to compromise my morals to get ahead and climb up the corporate ladder. Furthermore, I witnessed a LOT of people that I considered to be generally good people engage in unethical behavior because the corporate payout grid encouraged unethical behavior for career advancement. Those that choose to remain in the corporate system often don’t have a choice but to engage in unethical behavior to survive. If they don’t engage in unethical behavior, others will be advanced over them. However, if one day in the future, these same people chose to leave the corporate world and become an entrepreneur, I sincerely believe that much of their bad, unethical behavior would disappear.

I’m not arguing that entrepreneurs by nature are more moral than the rest of society because there will always be a percent of entrepreneurs that exhibit anti-social, greedy, criminal behavior as well. However, at least entrepreneurs have the choice to truly operate a business in the manner that they desire without having to bend their morals to fit the mission of a huge corporation. But this is the point where the education system may fail entrepreneurs and society.

On October 25, 2010, the Wall Street Journal printed an article titled, “Advisers Try to Tame Investor’s Appetite For Gold,” that quoted several independent, entrepreneurial financial advisors. This is what they said:

“I am not a gold bug, but I have a couple of clients that have just insisted,” said Jim Heitman, a financial planner in Alta Loma, Calif. “Even as they objectively recognize the threat of a bubble, they just don’t seem to care.” Mr. Heitman says he sometimes uses commodity-sensitive stock funds such as PowerShares Dynamic Basic Materials Sector ETF but doesn’t like making direct bets on a single commodity like gold. To clients who walk in the door craving gold, he makes two arguments. For one, long-term gold prices merely keep pace with inflation, and investors should concentrate instead on their broader goals like what kind of income they would like to generate. For those that won’t be swayed, he points toward SPDR Gold Trust, but he keeps the exchange-traded fund at no more than 5% of their overall portfolios.

Financial adviser Bob Kargenian, in Orange, Calif., has gone a step further and begun to sell. For instance, for his moderately aggressive clients, he has cut exposure to Van Eck International Investors Gold Fund, a mutual fund that focuses on gold miners, to about 1.8% of investment portfolios from about 3.5% at the end of September. Investors have hired him to protect them from their own worst instincts, he explains, particularly in situations like this. “If clients start calling us up and saying, ‘We want to see gold,’ that is like the kiss of death,” he joked, noting the general public’s tendency to arrive at good investment ideas too late. “It’s like seeing it on the cover of Time magazine.”

In addition to some of the wrong information provided above as well as poor advice, a quick perusal of the chart below should quickly dispel any notion that gold (or silver) is a bubble right now. Whenever a gold or silver correction has happened during the last nine years, those financial advisers with traditional education and traditional training always state that a gold/silver bubble is in the process of bursting. In fact my Wealth Secrets course, which is a compilation of courses that business schools fail to teach you but that I believe you need to build real wealth, includes courses about “The Monetary History and Investment Value of Gold and Silver” as well as “Understanding Austrian Versus Keynesian Economics”, “How to Properly Interpret Official Government Key Economic Indicators”, “A History of Central Banks and Their Motives” and How Money is Created, How the Monetary System Operates, and The True Definition of Money”. Perhaps if the advisers referenced by the Wall Street Journal above learned how money and capital markets truly work, they would stop calling every correction for the last nine years the bursting of the gold/silver bubble and be able to analyze the gold/silver bull market in its proper framework and perspective.

Perhaps, the above is the perfect evidence for my argument that many entrepreneurs should choose to remove themselves from the formal academic system. Accumulation of the wrong type of knowledge in academia can lead to a misunderstanding of how capital markets truly operate and the provision of horrible advice to clients, as unintentional as this may be. The flip side of this equation is that finance and investing is, of course, just a tiny slice of the entrepreneurial world. In many other entrepreneurial endeavors, academics would not be such a great hindrance, and may even serve as a catalyst toward the deliverance of a product or service that is far superior to one delivered by a corporate entity. In the end, entrepreneurialism alone will not save the world economy. However, I believe that entrepreneurialism combined with a recognition of the failures of the traditional academic system, and a negation of these failures with self-education by entrepreneurs CAN save the global economy and right many a sinking economy.

About the Author: In 2006, JS Kim founded SmartKnowledgeU, a unique, niche investment research and consulting company that uses Mr. Kim’s proprietary strategies to help Main Street thrive despite the fraud of Wall Street. SmartKnowledgeU provides an investment newsletter, research and consulting services that have provided wide margins of profit over the returns of global market indexes, often by margins greater than 25% to 40%. Follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/smartknowledgeu

Republishing Rights: The above article may be reprinted on other sites as long as all text and links remain intact exactly as is, including the above author acknowledgment.

I have slightly modified the time frames of the four above stages explained by Bezmenov to fit the model that bankers have cleverly executed against the people over the past several decades. The process of ideological subversion ensures that billions of people are unable to change their behavior and take sensible tactics to defend the welfare of their families despite being presented with an abundance of evidence that challenges and refutes their current harmful belief system.

The inability of the masses today to reach sensible conclusions even in the face of abundant evidence is the reason why we still have ludicrous debates in the media today about signs of economic recovery in the US and Europe despite an abundance of evidence that contradicts such a conclusion. The inability of the masses to reach sensible conclusions when struck over the head with cold hard facts is the reason why today we still have ludicrous debates regarding the purchasing power stability of gold versus fiat currencies. The inability of the masses to reach sensible conclusions today is why commercial investment firms can still sell the masses the kool-aid of strong fundamentals as the number one reason behind rising stock markets when creative accounting 101 is the primary driver behind improved earnings statements for almost global banks worldwide. The inability of the masses to formulate logical opinions is the reason why hundreds of millions of investors today still subscribe to one of the worst investment strategies ever – diversification. And a deliberate process called ideological subversion executed by bankers in the open for all to see can explain all of the aforementioned aberrant behavior.

Perhaps a brief explanation of how ideological subversion is achieved can awaken the sleeping zombies from the destructive forces of financial fraud that bankers are openly committing today and help aid them in taking their first step towards choosing truth over propaganda.

“The Ideological Subversion of the Retail Investor, Part I”

“The Ideological Subversion of the Retail Investor, Part II”

“The Ideological Subversion of the Retail Investor, Part III”

About the author: JS Kim is the Chief Investment Strategist and Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, LLC, a fiercely independent wealth consultancy company that guides investors in the best ways to invest in gold and silver through the progression of this global financial crisis. The above article may be reprinted on other sites provided all text and links are kept intact, including the above author acknowledgment.

Morgan Stanley will pay $4.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit with brokerage clients who bought precious metals and paid storage fees, according to a court filing.
The proposed settlement, which must be approved by the federal court in Manhattan, includes a cash component of $1.5 million and economic and remedial benefits valued at about $2.9 million, according to a court filing on Monday. The suit, filed in August 2005, alleged that Morgan Stanley told clients it was selling them precious metals that they would own in full and that the company would store. But Morgan Stanley either made no investment specifically on behalf of those clients, or it made entirely different investments of lesser value and security, according to the complaint.

About 3 years later, yet more fraud committed by JP Morgan has surfaced in which they co-mingled $8.6 billion of clients’ assets with its own for seven years without their clients’ knowledge:

JPMorgan Chase & Co.s London unit was fined a record 33.3 million pounds ($48.9 million) by Britain’s financial regulator for not properly separating client money from the firm’s accounts. An average of $8.6 billion wasn’t properly segregated by JPMorgan Securities Ltd. in an error that went undetected for seven years, the Financial Services Authority said in a statement today. Client money held by the bank’s futures and options business wasn’t put in a separate overnight customer account, the FSA said.

“The FSA has repeatedly emphasized the importance of ensuring that client money is adequately protected,” said Margaret Cole, the FSA Enforcement Director. “This penalty sends out a strong message to firms of all sizes that they must ensure client money is segregated in accordance with FSA rules. Firms need to sit up and take notice of this action — we have several more cases in the pipeline.” Had the company gone bankrupt, clients could have lost all their money, according to the regulator.

And with the Department of Justice now investigating JP Morgan for fraud and manipulation in the silver futures markets, one would pretty much have to possess the mental prowess of an ant to continue trusting JP Morgan by purchasing the SLV ETF and believing that holding the SLV will provide any protection to your financial wealth during the second phase of this monetary crisis.

About the author: JS Kim is the Chief Investment Strategist and Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, LLC, a fiercely independent wealth consultancy company that guides investors in the best ways to invest in gold and silver through the progression of this global financial crisis. Since its inception in June, 2007, until August 26, 2010 his Crisis Investment Opportunities newsletter has returned a cumulative profit of 120.62%.

The above article may be reprinted on other sites provided all text and links are kept intact, including the above author acknowledgment.

When I first started training in martial arts, I was very fortunate to have as my instructor a Navy SEAL trainer for the first four years of my martial arts life. Though those that have never trained in martial arts a single day in their life sometimes belittle such training due to their ignorance of the positive culture of such training, there is no doubt in my mind that the life lessons I learned from my training, if applied to our present global monetary crisis, would provide a clear path towards the development of a sustainable solution. SEALs abide by a certain warrior culture that make them very different from every other elite division of the military. Here are three rules that SEALs could teach Central Banks to abide by that would lead to the development of sustainable solutions instead of the quick fixes Central Banks design to fool the people:

RULE #1: Never make the same mistake twice. You are your best critic. When you make a mistake or do something wrong, take it onboard and take it seriously. Be hard on yourselves. Do what you have to in order to not make the same mistake twice.*

Central Banks continuously repeat the same mistake over and over again and seemingly are incapable of learning from their previous mistakes. Every time the bubbles and price distortions they create in stock markets and real estate markets crash, they have engineered the same response for decades – print more money out of thin air and re-inflate the bubbles again – though this response always ends in failure. Furthermore, Central Banks’ decisions to bail one another out to keep the fiat money system alive has never produced a positive result in the history of mankind, yet we find ourselves heading down this same path today. Greenspan himself admitted that the Fed Reserve’s actions to bail out the UK in the 1920s “nearly destroyed the economies of the world,” yet the Feds insist on repeating these same foolish actions today. If a Navy SEAL sat on the Board of Governors, without knowing a single thing about monetary policy or finance, he could still steer them to make wiser decisions. Employing the rule of never making the same mistake twice, a SEAL would have stopped Central Banks from reinflating bubbles decades ago.

Furthermore, given the penchant of Central Banks to repeatedly engage in the execution of the same mistake, determining the Euro’s fate more than 2- ½ years ago was fairly transparent. This is why, at the beginning of 2008, I stated in my book Confessions of a Wall Street Insider, “We can be assured that in 2008, the destruction of monetary value in both Europe and the United States will occur…when smart investors finally realize that no fiat currency is safe, I believe that investors (at least the savvy ones) will begin to dump the Euro and the Pound as well.” A couple of months after I made that comment, the Euro plummeted from about 1.58 USD to 1.25 USD. Today, we’re back at 1.27 USD. Despite (or perhaps better phrased as “As a result of”) a near trillion dollar bailout of the EU, the Euro remains doomed.

RULE #2: If some part of your platoon’s training is not working, perhaps it’s a matter of command and control or a gear problem or tactical maneuver; fix it now!*

Central Banks are notorious for lying to the public and covering up the truth for the purposes of selling false notions of hope and economic recovery and fooling the sheeple. Such tactics only delay an inevitable crash in financial markets, whether that crash arrives in the form of a melt up in markets denominated in worthless currencies or a deflation of asset values also accompanied by plummeting currency values. Central Banks never try to fix problems now but always choose to delay the inevitable for as long as possible as if delaying the implementation of a real solution and burying their heads in the sand will make the problem go away. A Navy SEAL would never allow such dishonest tactics as these types of tactics could cost the life of every member of his team. Instead, a Navy SEAL would undoubtedly hold all Governors’ feet to the fire. This is why we should desire the appointment of a Navy SEAL to the Board of Governors.

*Source: The Finishing School, by Dick Couch

RULE #3: Take your responsibilities seriously and be accountable for your actions. Don’t cut corners and don’t take the easy way out. Always do things the right way even if the right way is the hard way.**

Again, if you listen to Central Bankers speak, one would conclude that they never heard of the concept of personal accountability and responsibility. Instead of taking blame for the devastating consequences of their mistakes, Central Bankers always blame outside parties for their mistakes, claim such consequences can never be predicted even though Austrian economists repeatedly and accurately predict the consequences of their actions, and lavish undeserved praise upon themselves. Remember Ben Bernanke’s “we saved the world” speech that he gave at Jackson Hole, Wyoming last August 21, 2009? Well Ben, it appears that your declaration was just a little premature. Of course Ben’s arrogant, self-serving comments back then were a product of not adhering to the above SEAL rule of fixing problems now. Central Banks always take stop-gap measures to the emergencies they create that only delay the emergence of a more severe emergency six to nine months later. If a Navy SEAL were on the Board of Governors, he would no doubt kick out any team member that deliberately endangered the lives of team members (all citizens of the Republic of America and the world), refused to accept responsibility for one’s actions, and refused to fix a problem right away when identified. Yes, that means, Helicopter Ben would have been long gone by now.

**Source: The Warrior Elite, by Dick Couch

Central Bankers, it’s time you took a page out of the playbook of Navy SEALs.

About the author: JS Kim is the Chief Investment Strategist and Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, LLC, a fiercely independent wealth consultancy company that guides investors in the best ways to build wealth through the progression of this global financial crisis. His investment newsletter, Crisis Investment Opportunities, has significantly beat all major world indexes since its launch in 2007, outperforming the S&P 500 and FTSE 100 by more than 27% in 2007, both indexes by more than 40% in 2008 and both indexes by more than 51% from January 2009 to May 2010. Special thanks to my mentor, SEAL trainer Alvin Dukes, and author Dick Couch for providing the foundation for this article.